Danny and D. Noble fell in behind him, discharging their sawed-offs. Then all hell broke loose. The return fire grew deafening and told me our side was outnumbered if not outgunned. But fear had no hold over me. There wasn't time. Big Jamal grabbed my sleeve, and I followed his hawk-like gaze down below us at the stairwell's depths.
The phalanx of dark suits had punched in from the second-story doorway and taken the stairwell. Each dark suit hoisted an automatic weapon colored tactical black. Uzis, I recognized. If they cut loose, our tight quarters turned into a pinball alley of ricocheting fragments and certain injury or death. Firing his hog-leg .44 Magnum with two hands, Big Jamal clipped them low, knocking out their pins and toppling them.
I pitted the sawed-off's butt-stock to my shoulder. My rapid salvos rained down 00-buckshot, but it proved ineffectual against the body armor they'd donned. I switched tactics, aiming higher, and my next blasts axed off their meaty skulls at the necks. Joy was the opera singing through my veins. I'd fallen into the lunatic's zone.
New dark suits stomped out, tramping over their dead and raking us with their subsonic, hot projectiles. From the corner of my eye, I saw Big Jamal keel over and fall as an instant corpse at my shoes. My emotions superheated to a white rage quenched only by the glut of their blood that I could spill here.
Danny lurched down to beside me, plugging the gap. She followed Big Jamal's lead, concentrating her saw-offed to spurt out the pellets and chop them down from below the belt. The firefight was squalling above us. The dark suits had sandwiched us, their pincer squeezing from above and below on the stairway. They piled up dead and dying like cords of wood, but their replacements scrabbled in, and soon our cyclone of 00-buckshot blew them off the stairway.
"Tommy Mack! Esquire says press ahead," Danny hollered into my whistling ears.
My gaze snapped up saw our swarthy Viking warrior on the top landing, his bloodied hand motioning at us. I vowed our rear wasn't to be left exposed for the dark suits to cream us from behind with their Uzis. Our ascent closed ranks with Esquire heaving his massive chest to regain his breath. He shepherded Danny and me to scramble through the doorway into the third floor area where the dark suits had laid off their assaults. We took advantage of the lull and talked.
"Holding up?" I asked Esquire.
"I'm bursting, sweetheart. This is just the prelude."
"Where is D. Noble?"
"He stormed in, taking the brunt of their blast. I'm sorry to tell you he got hit in the head and dropped around the corner."
My swelling sob strangled in my throat. "Big Jamal is dead, too."
Lips pinched, Danny thumbed in the shells, reloading the sawed-offs. She looked at me. "Tommy Mack, I'd like to make it home alive tonight."
"Same here. Hermes gets cranky, if I don't get back before sunup."
"Then you guys forge ahead and clear out this floor," I said. "Meantime I'll hold open our route on the stairs."
"I like it, sweetheart. Let's rock and roll."
Danny gave me a hard-set look for an extra second. She'd seen through me. How I didn't know, but she had. I'd a lot more in mind than just keeping our exit free of dark suits. Leaving my friends wasn't because I'd lost my grit. No, I had larger buzz saw—Mr. Ogg obviously wasn't here—to dismantle before the night broke to dawn.
"Thanks for your help, Danny," I told her. "You've been great."
She smiled and hugged me. "Godspeed, Tommy Mack."
The mammoth Esquire had taken up D. Noble's reloaded sawed-off. "Don't worry about us. The governor on my emotions has sheared off, and I'll pull us through this."
I believed him. Nodding, I left them, my sawed-off grasped tight. I stepped around the fallen Big Jamal. The blood-soaked stairwell sent me down. The barrage had left my ears squealing with shrill tinnitus. Cordite—that's what I called the garlicky gun smoke—burned my throat as I hauled in powerful breaths through my mouth.
The human carnage stacked below blocked my path. Each step I took came with care. The going turned slippery with the smears of gore. The faceless corpses had shed blood everywhere I set down my weight. Their deaths had been instant. That was how I worked.
At the second-story landing, I expected—thirsted, even—for a new assault. My combat blood bubbled at a boil. Brutish vigor coiled my legs. Each breath I drew assured me I was standing upright to dish out more death, if need be.
A chunky head, scowling, poked out from the doorframe. I recognized him from the
Baltimore
outfit. Firing from the hip, my load of 00-buckshot hacked away the fleshy hunks from his bone white skull. Yeah, baby. I jacked in another round to terminate the next dark suit dumb enough to show his face.
Next by stumbling, lunging, and climbing, I made it over the stinking bog of mortal flesh. I chucked the sawed-off and heard it land, thunking off a corpse's neck stump. I found the traction for my final spurt that plowed me through the same exit we'd used to gain the stairway.
I staggered into Caligula's zombie horde that romped at its frenzied climax. The same music bashed my hearing. I bulldozed my path through the mosh pit of revelers grinding their body parts against me. The fire marshal would have a field day closing down the congested club. The oily cannabis smog choked me as I ducked to pass under the empty go-go cages—the dancers were between sets—swaying on their spindly, silver chains.
A blue-skinned go-go dancer accosted me. If she was 16, I was 26 again. She came topless, not her best asset, but I didn't judge her. Her skeletal fingers and razor fingernails clamped my forearm, and I flinched at her grip strength.
"Yo, soul brother man." She giggled at her campy quip. "You want to party with me?"
"Sorry, babe, but jail bait ain't my bag."
She cackled, a haggish laugh. "How I adore this house light. Soul brother man, double your guess, and you'll hit my right age."
"Then you should know better than to be here. May I have my arm back? I'd like to take it along with me."
"What's your rush, soul brother man?"
"Your club scene ain't for me."
"Did you give Caligula’s a fair chance?"
"Better than fair, yes, I did." I tugged but she didn't unshackle her talons' clench detaining me. "It’s too damn bloody."
"I like it damn bloody."
"Then go to the fire stairs and have yourself a ball. I've never seen so much blood spilled in one place."
"Awesome." She relinquished my forearm, liberating me. "I'll have me a little peek-a-boo, and then I'll hit a rail of what you snorted."
I rubbed my smarting forearm. "Rock on, lady."
"Later, soul brother man."
As I shouldered out Caligula's front door, I heard a lady wail in a delivery room's bawls, her outbursts piercing the music's throbbing bassline. The blue-skinned go-go dancer had found the stairwell chocked to overflowing with bloody death. My pace redoubled as I dissolved into the late night.
Chapter 30
T
he coupé could still fire up, and I struck a course for Mr. Ogg's bungalow. I'd already fitted the four-eyed, double crossing scrote for a pine box. Tonight his dark suits had killed my homeys Big Jamal and D. Noble. Rage lit my fuse from both ends, and it flamed like balls of napalm exploding in my guts. I enjoyed a lucid insight. Year after year, I'd killed at Mr. Ogg's behest until I lost my allegiance to follow his orders. Shell-shocked to within inches of my life, I crawled back into my humanity, and I liked what of it I still found left there, and tonight I intended to reclaim it.
I moored the coupé on a cul-de-sac two streets over from Mr. Ogg's bungalow and left on foot. My business had been violence,
had
as in the past tense. But now freedom was so close at hand I could almost taste it. It incited the revolt of the maverick cyborg that’d grown a conscience to turn on and destroy his evil programmer.
After stopping, I bent down and retied my shoelaces tighter, girding myself for the showdown ahead. The suburbanites lay tucked away in their beds. No dogs yipped. No sirens yowled. No babies wailed. I made the jackknife turn at Mr. Ogg's corner. The yard post lamps and street lights cast enough luminosity to see the color of the parked cars. Most were the navy blue sedans. The dark suits never varied their drab tastes.
A half-dozen sedans, and at least that many dark suits protected Mr. Ogg. At daybreak, he'd turn out their replacements to run sweeping patrols through the city and grease me. I'd brought other plans. I turned off the sidewalk and huddled behind a leafy hollyhock screen. My deeper breaths inflated my lungs before I peered out from the hedge's bottom corner. The closest sedan and its dark suit lay perhaps thirty paces away from me.
The shatter of glass breakage directed my sight to the bottles and flasks the dark suits had busted into shards on the pavement. The booze helped them blunt the tedium of night sentry duty. No doubt the smarter dark suits owned the day shift. If Mr. Ogg caught these drinking, he'd string them up by their nuts, but I expected he'd followed his neighbors' example and also slept in bed.
The update of the Caligula bloodbath hadn't yet reached here. Before it did, how did I slip past the dark suits? Did I create a diversion? A string of cherry bombs snapping off might distract them, but I'd no cherry bombs. Then I heard a sedan door latch clink open. My next view from the hedge observed a dark suit slapping the sedan door shut and, after a roundabout gaze, he wasted no time heading down the sidewalk toward me.
As the pee shy one, he scuffled along faster. The coins and keys jingled in his pockets. He sought to use the hedge's privacy to relieve himself of the consumed hooch that pressured his bladder. My fingers clutched Big Jamal’s Glock barrel as I withdrew, scrunching lower in the shadows.
The dark suit curled around the hedge's corner and, his feet planted apart, stood before his alfresco urinal. My muscles tensed. As his zipper rustled down, I lunged up, slashing the Glock like a sap to stun him on the crown. Grunting, he dropped like a sack of rocks. I lowered to my knees, and his bullish neck felt clammy with sweat for my fingers to crush his windpipe and choke the life out of him.
He gargled, moaned, and bucked me, his legs thrashing, arms whipping, and his shoes gouging. But my weight rode down his chest. I let go of his throat, grabbed his skull, and wrenched it in an unnatural pivot. That stunt took the fight out of him. Breathing in jerks, I dragged his bulky corpse under the armpits into the denser shadows when the cell phone on his belt vibrated. Great. His cell phone slid out. I engaged it and disguised my voice.
"Butterfingers—we got creamed. Bad. The club is like a war zone."
"So?"
"So? Send over some guys. Move it!"
"Huh?"
"Grab a few of the others, get down here. Quick."
"Bite me."
"No joke, man."
“Then tell Mr. Ogg.”
“Better you than me. Just hurry.”
"We're coming."
"That's more like it. I gotta go."
"Yeah."
I pulverized the nuisance cell phone underfoot, doffed my clothes, and climbed into Butterfinger's dark suit that hung two sizes large off my frame. I felt like it was Halloween as I rolled up the floppy shirtsleeves and baggy trouser cuffs. His corpse packed an 11-mm in a shoulder rig that I swapped for the Glock 9-mm since his hard skull had dislodged its barrel from the backstrap. I skipped knotting on the necktie, log-rolled him to conceal under the hedge, and almost tripped on the navy blue fedora. A snazzy touch, it rounded off my new retro-gangster costume. My old clothes and the broken Glock 9-mm got dumped in the trash bin left for morning curb pick up.
Striking off toward Butterfingers's sedan, I did my best acting job to ape his porky gait. My heartbeats were pulsing the jolts through my neck and jaws. My nerve endings had frayed. Then my ratcheted up fear vanished, replaced by my detached mode taken whenever I circled in on the mark. That was all I faced here. As my fingers curved under the door latch to open Butterfingers' sedan, I heard a hoarse cough hack out behind me. An abrasive male voice I didn't recognize heckled me.
"Everything come out all right, Butterfingers?"
My guttural growl tried to discourage talk. "Piss off."
"Why are you sore? I'm just busting your balls a little. Relax, paisan."